social network

Of all the questions about Twitter, the most common is probably "how do I get verified?" Now, the 140-character social network is throwing open the verification process to applications, inviting those who believe they're notable enough to get the coveted blue tick to apply for consideration.

Facebook Instant Articles, the articles from participating publications that load instantly when clicked, have made their way to Messenger. The social network opened up Instant Articles to all publishers a few months back; it only makes sense that they’d expand them to cover Messenger, too, as they've done today. Kicking them off are Instant Articles on Android, but they'll be coming to iOS in future weeks, too.

If you fancy yourself something of a GIF connoisseur, then you may be pleased to hear this: Twitter has upped its GIF size limit to 15MB. Before today, Twitter users were limited to using GIFs that maxed out at 5MB in size, so this is a pretty significant upgrade for those who have decided to forgo the whole typing thing and have instead chosen GIFs as their main form of communication on the social media platform.

Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out a feature for Pages that allows users to share a message in multiple languages, making them more friendly to a larger, more diverse customer base. Starting today, Facebook is testing that same multi-language story feature for individual Facebook users, giving them the same status tool that’ll eliminate the need to publish multiple versions of the same status or publish one very long status that contains multiple language versions of the same message.

Selfies, food photos, gratuitous humble-brags... Instagram has them all, and it also has, as of today, 500 million members active every month. The new user milestone comes on the heels of the photo sharing service's big brand revamp which left many members spitting over the pared-back icon and more minimalistic app, but that controversy doesn't appear to have had a negative impact on how many actually use it.

Facebook is rolling its suicide and self-harm prevention tools out to users around the world, the company announced on Tuesday, doing so in collaboration with local partners. This follows a controversial update Facebook had rolled out to its suicide prevention tools last year; in that instance, users flagged as suicidal would be temporarily locked out of their Facebook account, being unable to access it until they viewed helpful materials designed to prevent suicides.

If there's nothing so lovely to you as the sound of your own voice, rejoice: today, Twitter has turned on the ability to retweet your own tweets. The functionality was promised as part of Twitter's big update back in May, when it also announced changes to how @-names were counted to the 140 character limit.

Microsoft will buy LinkedIn for $26.2bn, the two companies have announced today, with the surprise acquisition of the business-focused social network continuing Satya Nadella's strategy to further invest in services. The deal - announced while Microsoft is also readying at least one new Xbox One console for unveil this morning - will see LinkedIn retain its own brand rather than be subsumed into Microsoft-whole.

Facebook’s previously announced 360-degree photos support has gone live. Starting today, users can upload 360-degree panoramas to their Facebook account for their friends to see on desktop or mobile. When browsing Facebook, you’ll know if you’ve come across a 360-degree photo due to a small compass icon that’ll be placed on its right side. That aside, uploading 360-degree photos isn't any harder than uploading an ordinary photo.

LeakedSource has published a searchable database that has the credentials of millions of user accounts from different social networks on the web. The latest addition to the leaked database of user credentials is claimed to be a massive leak of Twitter user data.

Facebook Live Video is great, but not if you want to give the world a 24/7 look at your hamster, backyard, or whatever you’ve got around that’s at least mildly interesting. That changes with Facebook’s new Continuous Live Video support launch, adding a non-stop broadcasting option to the social network’s live video platform. There is a downside, though — you won’t be able to save the videos for viewing later on.

If you're keen on watching a Facebook Live Video but don't have any in particular in mind, you can check out Facebook's interactive live video map to see who is streaming. The map automatically pulls up a notable livestream that has a bunch of viewers, and also shows where a video is being watched using threads that connect a video visually with dots on the locations of its viewers.